The Unseen Costs to the Injured or Ill Worker

Did you know that a study of partially-disabled injured/ill workers in the United States concluded that their incomes on average drop by 40 percent over the following five years? That sort of financial pressure contributes, amongst other factors, to the breaking of many families. Did you also know that worldwide there are 2.2 million work-related deaths[1] annually? And that was the figure in 2005. That’s a startling figure. There is an opportunity for organisations around the globe to focus more convincingly on serious/fatal injury prevention.

There is also the matter of the unseen costs to employee health, particularly mental health, in light of physiological and psychological issues and affects underlying work systems in this day.
When we bring in change to a family like a seriously injured mother, father, son or daughter there are ramifications that interrupt family dynamics, sometimes changing things forever. Not many in the typical workplace ever see these issues; they’re often managed behind closed doors where the family survive in shame, guilt and disempowerment.

At the recent WorkSafe Forum, Tony Cooke, Chair of the Commission for Occupational Safety and Health in Western Australia said organisations shouldn’t “erode a good safety culture with externalities.” The externalities he alluded to included the heavy focus on systems compliance without the commensurate attention to augment culture and safety behaviour. Worker behaviour and overall safety culture is an organisational responsibility. Externalities can also be the drivers of business from the market economy we’re entrenched in as part of Western society. Human life should always surpass the economic bottom line, though sadly, in reality, it often does not. This is a challenge for the chief executive and senior management of every organisation to courageously resist a plethora of external and internal drivers that prove to be barriers to good safety and health outcomes.

We don’t often think of the personal impacts of injury or illness until they strike us cold at ‘4 P.M. on some idle Tuesday,’ as the Sunscreen Song puts it. We ought to bear it more thought. It can happen to any one of us in a moment… we do have brothers, sisters, friends, mothers, fathers, children that we love, don’t we?

Let’s not take our safety for granted. The costs (both seen and unseen) are potentially huge and life changing.

[1] There are many sites that give this information. One of them is http://www.ishn.com/Articles/Industry_News/31c5dbf7161c7010VgnVCM100000f932a8c0____